The Electoral College; Help or Hinderance to Democracy
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Course
American politics (PI3071)
Institution
The University Of Aberdeen (Aberd)
This essay is written in a blog post format. It discusses whether the Electoral College is a robust voting system or if another system would benefit the people more.
The Electoral College; Help or Hinderance to Democracy
On 8th November 2016, a younger and naiver version of myself tuned into an American
election for the very first time. Huddled in front of the TV, I was surprised by the spectacle
of it all; the graphics, the suspense as states turn red or blue while the “race to 270” is
emphasised repeatedly. There is no doubt that it was an exciting and dramatic affair but is
the electoral college more of a performance than a truly viable democratic system? The
electoral college is the system that decides who wins the presidency, it is broken up into
electoral seats for every state based on population. Interestingly, it is not the initial state
vote that elects the President. Instead representatives meet a month later to vote for their
state, using the way the state coted to influence their decision. I believe that, for America to
be a truly democratic nation, the electoral college has to be altered in order to lessen its
disproportionality while also putting more power into the popular vote.
The Electoral college has been in charge of electing the President since the founding fathers
implemented it into the constitution, which is a major reason people give for keeping the
system as is. However, the truth is that the system that American democracy has come to
rely on was merely a compromise between having congress decide or giving control to the
citizens. The founding fathers did not see the Electoral college as a perfect democratic
monolith to guide America from president to president. In reality, it was just a compromise
to two warring ideals. As George Edwards III, Professor of Political Science at Texas
University, states; “They were tired, impatient, frustrated. They cobbled together this plan
because they couldn’t agree on anything else.” In my opinion, a cobbled-together
compromise doesn’t inherently mean it’s a bad system, if it worked.
The main problem people say the electoral college has is the disproportionate power it gives
smaller states. This is due to the misbalance of electoral college seats in comparison to
population, meaning that a vote in a state with a smaller population like Wyoming means
four times as much as a vote in Texas. Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social
policy at Harvard University, expressed his opinion on this fault; “ “When you talk about the
Electoral College shaping the election, it shapes the election all the time because it puts the
focus on certain states and not others,” However, while this evidently highlights a colossal
miss-step in representation, it is not this structure’s biggest failure. The winner takes all
system that 48 states of the electoral college use means that the most popular candidate
across the entire state wins all electoral college votes. This leads to the voting minority
feeling like their vote doesn’t matter and skews the result to paint a narrow, too simplistic
picture. It also means that, unless something dramatically improbable happens, only swing
states get attention.
It is evident that the electoral college is an incredibly flawed and barely viable way to
democratically elect the “leader of the free world”. However, there is an already tried and
tested solution to alleviate the issues presented above, and it comes in the unlikely form of
two small, seemingly inconsequential states; Nebraska and Maine. Unlike the other 48, the
two aforementioned states do not follow the winner takes all framework and instead
adopted the congressional district method. This system allocates two electoral votes to the
state-wide popular vote winner, just like the winner takes all approach, but then assigns
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